In 'My Selma,' Willie Mae Brown recalls growing up during the Civil Rights Movement

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Willie Mae Brown was a little girl in Selma, Alabama in the 1960s. In her new YA book, My Selma, she recalls growing up during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the South. As she tells Here & Now's Robin Young, those core childhood memories include going to church to see Martin Luther King, Jr. speak – which moved Brown's mother to tears as she held the author – and her siblings getting arrested for trying to accompany teachers who were planning to register to vote. But, she says, there was also a lot of joy and community as a child on the frontlines of justice.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Timbermias, and this is NPR's Book of the Day.
0:06.2	When we think of the civil rights movement, it's easy to get swept up in the larger-than-life
0:11.1	figures and moments that dominate its history. And in a new book aimed at young adults,
0:17.2	Willie May Brown writes about her childhood in Selma, Alabama, with an eye towards both,
0:22.8	like recalling the time she met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to her childhood church.
0:28.9	But she also focuses on the quieter, more subtle moments of her childhood,
0:33.7	playing jacks with friends, the vernacular and the intimacy it communicated, and growing up under
0:40.6	the degradation of Jim Crow segregation. The book is called My Selma, true stories of a
0:47.0	southern childhood at the height of the civil rights movement. And Willie May Brown tells here
0:51.8	and now's Robin Young that her childhood, while full of the horrors of racial segregation, was also filled with triumph.
0:59.7	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:04.5	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground
1:12.3	bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:18.7	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:24.5	When Selma, Alabama was recently torn apart by that tornado, it was hard not to think of another time when it was rent-asunder by racism.
1:33.3	March 7, 1965, Bloody Sunday.
1:36.5	Black, non-violent protesters attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge to walk to Montgomery to confront racist Governor George Wallace over voting rights.
1:45.8	John Lewis and other organizers were beaten by white men deputized for the day by the county
1:50.7	sheriff Jim Clark. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led over 2,000 marchers over
1:56.7	the bridge and then turned them around, obeying a court order. That became turnaround Tuesday.
2:02.8	Marchers eventually made it to Montgomery and helped pass the 1965 Roading Rights Act. But before
2:08.7	that, King made earlier visits to Selma, where for months black residents had been protesting
	...

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